I wish I could find the article, from the NYT I think, about a Ph.D. in math from Berkeley, a logician even, who took a quant job, made gobs of cash, fucked things up so that his company lost gobs of cash, quit, & ended up doing shark fishing in the Pacific, because it had the thrills to which he'd become accustomed on Wall Street.

Detective Superintendent Lee Neiles told the hearing: ‘Mr Birch had been redundant since September 2009 and had had difficulties in finding other means of employment, although the family were financially stable.’

god I *hate* the british use of the term 'redundant'. it's so callous.

this is typical police illiterately pretentious usage though. no one except a policeman would say "he has been redundant for a year". you get made redundant, and then you are unemployed. like how only police say "i was proceeding along oxford st" or "he asked myself how to get to piccadilly circus".

Adoboli (who, let me stress, has yet to enter a plea) was in exchange traded funds – which used to look like unit trusts, but have got increasingly complicated. One of the top market regulators, Mario Draghi, recently described ETFs as "reminiscent of what happened in the securitisation market before the crisis". Read that quote again: he's comparing them to sub-prime mortgages. Most of us should get very worried; rogue traders should go steaming in.

Republicans say Dodd-Frank is the root of some of today’s economic problems. It has stopped banks from lending to “job creators,” they contend, and is a direct cause of high unemployment. “It created such uncertainty that the bankers, instead of making loans, pulled back,” said Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, speaking at a South Carolina rally over Labor Day weekend where he again called for the law’s repeal.

that study sounds pretty weak but oh well i'm still always happy when people push the psychopath angle, cuz if there were a cultural and spiritual system that caused and possibly even mandated people who were not psychopaths to behave like psychopaths that system might benefit from review

The Hibernian Express will shave six milliseconds off that time.Of course, verifiable figures are elusive and estimates vary wildly, but it is claimed that a one millisecond advantage could be worth up to $100m (£63m) a year to the bottom line of a large hedge fund.

A high-speed fibre network between London and Hong Kong could help decrease financial trading times

Financial traders and law firms are set to benefit from a new low-latency network between London and Hong Kong, which can conduct data on a round trip from Europe to Asia in around 176 milliseconds.

The cable network, run by UK-based trading technology company BSO Network Solutions, has been in place for some time, but previously had to route around large parts of Russia, due to difficulties laying fibre in that country.

However, a new lower latency and higher availability ‘Transit Mongolia’ connection has helped to reduce the time of a round trip by more than 20 milliseconds during the last 12 months. Improvements have also been made at BSO’s Ancotel point-of-presence (POP) in Frankfurt and Mega-I POP in Hong Kong.

The banks are all paying with other people’s money.” And a $285 million fine for a bank the size of Citigroup, he noted, is so small that it barely qualifies as a cost of doing business.John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School, called the ruling a “perfunctory” opinion and said it was a mystery to him why it took the court more than a year to write it. “An average law clerk could have drafted it in two days,” he said.

To my surprise, even prominent corporate defense lawyers who said they felt that Judge Rakoff had gone too far told me this week that they were troubled by the appeals court’s reasoning and its implications. (They didn’t want to be identified, since they litigate before the Second Circuit.)So, with these comments in mind, I decided to don some imaginary judicial robes and write a dissent — the opinion that, in my view, the Second Circuit should have issued. (I’ve omitted all citations and footnotes, leaving those to my equally imaginary law clerks.)...

As a matter of simple logic, Judge Rakoff’s position would seem to be unassailable. How can anyone decide a punishment is fair without knowing anything about what occurred?That’s not to say that judges shouldn’t pay deference to the decision of the parties to settle and the terms they have agreed upon. The parties should have wide latitude to settle cases as they see fit. Courts should defer to the agencies they oversee, and shouldn’t substitute their own judgments for the agencies’. Nothing is inherently wrong with allowing defendants to settle while neither admitting nor denying the accusations, although that should never be used merely as an excuse to avoid trial and might be used too often. I note that the S.E.C. itself has since said it will try to curtail the practice in appropriate cases.But neither should judges, as Judge Rakoff’s lawyer put it, be reduced to “potted plants.” To approve a settlement, judges need some facts. This court doesn’t have to decide how many are enough; that should be decided on a case-by-case basis. But I do note that in this instance, relatively few seem to be in dispute. The offering document prepared by Citigroup, which is at the center of the case, is a matter of record. It would seem relatively easy for Citigroup and the S.E.C. to stipulate to a set of facts sufficient to satisfy Judge Rakoff, especially since both seem eager to put this matter behind them.

Mr. Zucman estimates -- conservatively, in his view -- that $7.6 trillion -- 8 percent of the world's personal financial wealth -- is stashed in tax havens. If all of this illegally hidden money were properly recorded and taxed, global tax revenues would grow by more than $200 billion a year, he believes. And these numbers do not include much larger corporate tax avoidance, which usually follows the letter but hardly the spirit of the law.

I caught most of this while cooking supper over the weekend. I agree entirely. Was enraged by the jaw-dropping timidity of "Let's send Goldman Sachs a scolding letter; worst case is they ignore it." And the subsequent self-congratulation of "we fussed at them pretty good".

Very weird to me how Wells Fargo can get fined $185 million for opening fake bank accounts and issuing fake credit cards and the stock price basically doesn't budge. I realize that the $185 million itself is not a lot in the grand scheme of their earnings, but I would think the fake accounts part would matter. Maybe it's balanced out by their firing of 5300 employees -- wall street loves layoffs!

Yesterday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing on Wells Fargo should have ended with CEO John Stumpf hauled off in handcuffs. In a little over two hours, Stumpf revealed enough information, combined with what was already known in public records and filings, to make a powerful case for securities fraud. Specifically, that he touted fraudulent sales figures to investors as evidence of the bank’s growth, boosting the stock price and personally benefiting by $200 million. Worst of all, Stumpf used low-paid workers as the raw materials for this scheme, and as the scapegoats when it unraveled....

If the SEC and the Justice Department don’t get involved here, they might as well not even exist. CFPB’s Cordray and OCC’s Thomas Curry wouldn’t say whether they issued criminal referrals to law enforcement in this case, though Cordray hinted at it. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, if she wants to emerge from wherever she’s been hiding on this issue, has enough information to bring cases.

Will President Barack Obama’s administration end its tenure as it began, by refusing to prosecute systemic fraud in the financial markets? That’s the unavoidable conclusion so far.

Obama's doing $34,000 a plate fundraising dinners and then imploring money to get out of politics a day later. Sure, it's good theater to watch Warren put him on the hotspot but she'd never publicly go after the person who could actually launch an investigation: Lynch has always been a stooge.

Supposedly (according to the informational memo WF "helpfully" provided employees about this crisis) WF goes through 100k branch employees a year. I'm not sure how that was intended to reassure.. Branch employees (tellers, personal bankers, even sales managers) get treated like crap and not paid a living wage, yes, but that's an even larger issue than the small amount of people that were fired in connection with this.